As Simple as Snow (3 page)

When football practice started at the end of summer, Bryce didn’t show up, and when school started he had a shaved head and was dressed all in black. He wasn’t the first, but he was the one they cared about.

Bryce Druitt was a world away from me—he lived in another town, he drove, he was a Goth, and he was a senior. We never should have had anything to do with each other, and I wish he wasn’t in this story at all.

locker

To be honest, I wasn’t much of a reader before I met Anna. I was in the library only to see if I could meet someone. This was advice that was given to me by our coach and art teacher, Mr. Devon. “It’s a good way to meet girls,” he told me as I handed in my helmet and uniform and pads. “It gives you something to talk about with them, you know, breaks the ice a little. You have to think about it, though. Don’t just grab the first book you see, or the books everybody else is reading. You want to stand out from the crowd.” Mr. Devon always seemed to be hanging out with some girl in the hallway between classes, or after school, so I figured he knew what he was talking about. Besides, I didn’t really have anything to lose. I thought about where to go in the library and what books to try out. I didn’t want to get stuck with any nonfiction—that seemed like too much work—and I wasn’t going near poetry or any of that romantic stuff. That left fiction (or encyclopedias and other reference books, if I wanted to attract a very particular, peculiar girl, the kind you didn’t need a book to attract in the first place). I finally decided to go after books that I would actually want to read and that would attract a certain type of girl, somebody interesting and smart, or who at least thought I was smart. I ended up picking Jack Kerouac because I knew that few other people in my class would even know who he was and I guess because he was kind of like someone I hoped to be. He was a cool guy for a while in the 1950s, a James Dean type, and maybe I thought that some of that would rub off on me if girls saw me with his book. If I could be more like Jack Kerouac, then maybe I wouldn’t need to hang out in the library to meet girls. For me, it worked the first time out. I guess Mr. Devon didn’t think that football was going to do the trick for me.

I was too light, for one thing, but I was fast and had good hands, so he put me in at wide receiver. I didn’t start or anything like that, but I saw some action and wasn’t entirely horrible. We lost every game anyway, so you had to be completely worthless not to play. I had maybe a dozen or so passes thrown to me, even caught one for a touchdown, but it was called back on a penalty. Then in practice after the fifth game of the season I broke the index finger on my left hand. Even my injury lacked any sort of glamour or interest. I had caught a pass in the flat, maybe ten yards from the line of scrimmage, and was tackled by three or four guys, and somebody stepped on my hand as they were getting up from the pile and my finger snapped like a twig. It didn’t hurt, but it swelled up immediately and turned blue and purple. The assistant coach, Mr. Ham (he was an enormous guy, so no one ever made fun of his name, not even behind his back), walked me back to the locker room like I had a broken skull or something. He even offered to call my parents for me. I told him that I used the phone with my right hand, which got a laugh out of him at least.

My mom picked me up and drove me to the hospital. They took X rays and a day or two later told us what we already knew. The season was going to be over before the broken finger could heal, and my parents wanted me to quit, and I didn’t try to talk them out of it, and Mr. Devon didn’t try to talk me out of it, and that was that. It might have been different if I had been a starter. I imagined myself pulling down a game-winning pass with one good hand and the other heavily taped. Of course that didn’t happen. “Put some weight on and study the playbook and we’ll see about next season,” Mr. Devon told me after I had cleared out my locker.

 

 

 

The morning after she had talked to me in the library, Anna was waiting by my locker. At least I like to think that she was waiting there—she might have just been standing near it with some of her friends. They were grouped together as they always were, only this time in a different spot. I saw her as I started to open the lock, and gave her a quick nod when she saw me. She left her friends and came over.

“Did you finish Kerouac yet?” she said.

I laughed. “No.”

“You’d better get a move on, we’ve got a lot to accomplish.”

“Like what?”

“You’ll see,” she said. “Maybe.”

I opened my locker and found a note she had left for me. “Dear HP—There’s a whole world all around more interesting, wonderful, terrifying, mysterious, amazing than any novel ever written. Pay attention. Take a chance. Dare life. Love, craft.”

Over the following months, she would always call me different names in her notes and letters, and never sign anything with her own name. Sometimes the references were obvious, and sometimes I didn’t know what the hell she was trying to tell me. This one seemed obvious. She had been looking for H. P. Lovecraft in the library, but then I started thinking about it more, thinking too much perhaps. Could both the HP and the pun at the end refer to the same thing? It would mean that the postcard was addressed to and written by the same person, so I began to think that the HP didn’t refer to Lovecraft at all, but was short for “higgledy-piggledy.” I didn’t like that so much. Maybe she was making fun of me, or trying to humiliate me. That moment made all the difference; two paths were clearly marked: Turn my back on Anna’s difficult attention and continue with my life, or respond to her, follow her, and watch the world I thought I knew reveal things I had never imagined. Of course, at the time I was unaware of any of this. I just followed whatever instinct I had. I wasn’t sure if I liked Anna. Although I thought she was beautiful and sexy and all that, she was scary, mysterious. I knew there could be trouble. I think I knew it even then.

I threw the note away, but by the time I reached home I regretted it.

1 october

She had left a postcard in my locker. The front was a photograph of some old Mexican guy, who, I discovered, was Pancho Villa. On the back was written: “Lora—Good-by—if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia! A. Bierce.” This was Goth flirting, this was Anna Cayne. This one was a keeper. I taped it to my bedroom wall; it was the first of many to go there. Each one was a little puzzle, and now I know that each was a piece of a larger puzzle too. It was a game, and I spent most of that night trying to think of some clever comeback, but she had me at a disadvantage. She was smarter. I spent the rest of that night thinking about her.

4 october

I had wanted to ask her out after we talked in the library, but it didn’t seem to make any sense. What would the rest of the school think? I would be linked with the Goths and further alienated from everyone. Of course I was alienated already. On Friday I saw her in the hall before class and went up to her.

“I finished,” I said.

“Finished what?”

“Both books. Both. Kerouac and King.”

“Good for you,” she said. She was cold and distant, quickly walking away from me. I had to follow her.

“I was thinking that maybe you could help me pick out something else.”

“Sorry,” she said. “You’re on your own.” She stopped and looked straight at me. Her eyes seemed to be looking at something behind me, gazing straight through me and then off into the distance. “I’ve got to go to class.”

That was almost the end of it. But I was getting my coat from my locker at the end of the day when she came up to me. She was in a hurry. “Here,” she said. She handed me two slim paperbacks:
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
by Tadeusz Borowski and
The Street of Crocodiles
by Bruno Schulz. “Read these,” she said.

“More dead guys?” I said.

“No one can disappoint you when they’re dead.”

I took the books and started to walk away.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. Home, I guess.”

“I’ll walk with you.” We left school and she said she wanted to walk down by the river. “Are you in a hurry to get home?”

“Never,” I said.

The Furniss River was about a half-mile east of the school. It cut through town and ran south, bending around until it flowed eastward for about a mile before it snaked south again. It was a small river, no more than a quarter of a mile across, but it was deep and had a strong current, especially in the spring and fall. Two bridges crossed the river, one at the south end of town and one that ran into Main Street just north of the middle of town. Main Street, which defined the business district, was only five blocks long and consisted of two restaurants (The Oaks and Burke’s), three bars, a post office, a public library, a liquor store, two pottery stores, a used-book store and a video store, a bait-and-tackle store, a canoe and kayak rental shop, a small grocery that was almost worthless (you were better off going to Gurney’s gas station at the south end of town—at least they never ran out of milk and other staples), and an art gallery where local artists sold their stuff.

A dirt hiking path followed the river along the western side from one edge of town to the other, and we walked south along that. We could see a few fishermen packing up their gear before it turned dark.

“Do you ever walk down here at night?” she said.

“No.”

“You should. It’s quiet, with just the sound of the river and the wind. It’s calming. Sometimes I come down here when I can’t sleep, and I just sit and listen. I’ve fallen asleep on the banks before, and then had to hurry home in the morning before my parents found out. You should come here sometime late at night.”

“I’d probably fall in,” I said.

“Can I ask you something? Something kind of personal?”

“It depends,” I said.

“When you came up to me earlier today, were you going to ask me out?”

“What?”

“Were you going to ask me to the game tonight?”

I couldn’t even get a response out, just an open-mouthed, slack-jawed silence.

“Never mind,” she said. “Let me try this again. Would you go to the game with me?”

“Why?”

“Well, that’s for you to figure out,” she said. “But let me tell you something. I thought that you were going to ask me out earlier, and that’s why I acted like a jerk. I’m sorry. I wasn’t ready, and then when I realized what you were doing, it freaked me out. I’m not used to people paying attention to me, I mean like that, so I had to figure it out first. I had to buy some time.”

“And?”

“And I would be very happy if you would ask me to the game tonight.”

“Would you go to the game with me, tonight?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, and then she leaned over and gave me a very quick kiss on the mouth.

 

 

 

I went home and ate my dinner in as few bites as humanly possible and then walked over to Anna’s. Her mom drove us to the game. Mrs. Cayne looked nothing like her daughter. While Anna had a round face with a small nose, her mother was almost gaunt, with a sharp, prominent nose. Her hair was crazy and frizzy and went everywhere before it finally collapsed below her shoulders. She looked slightly deranged or dangerous. In fact, she looked kind of like the Wicked Witch in
The Wizard of Oz.
I half expected monkeys to fly into the car and grab me and take me to some cage somewhere.

She was a paralegal, or a legal aide, something legal.

 

 

 

We were sitting in the bleachers, near the top, in the second-to-last row, where Anna always sat. None of her friends had arrived yet. It was just the two of us. I was nervous. By Monday everyone in school would know. I felt that everyone was staring at us, but that was impossible. They were all looking at the field. No one cared, but I still felt awkward, sitting with my stupid blue and gold school jacket, and she was dressed all in black. My parents had bought me the jacket when I made the football team. “You need it so you can wear your letter,” my mother said. Only now I wasn’t going to get a letter. I just had the jacket. I wished I could be down at the bench, at least there the jacket would make sense, and people would see me with the splint on my finger. I was nervous. All of a sudden, I didn’t know what to say.

“You haven’t said anything about my finger.” I kind of held up the splint toward her.

“What did you want me to say, ‘Way to go, dumbass’?”

“Most people say something,” I said.

“Most people say the obvious.”

She had teased me from the first time she spoke to me, and I liked it. A bright glint would appear in her eyes, a sense of enjoyment and a clue not to take her seriously. Her mouth took on a hint of a smile, and her voice was not as deadpan as she probably would have wanted. It was a game, flirtatious and fleeting, a way to pass the time and test each other’s agility.

“I didn’t know if you knew about it.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, but I did know about it.”

“Believe me, I’m not flattered,” I said. I asked her if she had been to any of the games before.

“All of them,” she said. I already knew the answer. We used to talk about them on the bench, the vampires huddled together at the top of the stands. They never cheered; they just sat and watched, like menacing birds on a wire.

“Why?”

The glint evaporated and her eyes turned dark and hard. “What you don’t know about what you don’t know about.” She shook her head. I had been scolded. Then she started to laugh.

“Have you ever seen the movie
Strangers on a Train
?”

“No.”